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Wilocity this week unveiled the Wil6300 802.11ad, multi-gigabit Wi-Fi chipset for smartphones, which the company said can perform 10 times faster than standard 802.11ac chips found in today's mobile devices.

The developer of 60 GHz multi-gigabit wireless chipsets is showcasing the new Wil6300 part at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

"The huge performance boost offered by 802.11ad, operating in the 60 GHz band, combined with massive demand growth for Wi-Fi, makes this a natural fit for mobile phone users. 802.11ad will fundamentally change the way people use their mobile phone to access, view and share their personal media," Wilocity co-founder and CEO Tal Tamir said in a statement.

Wilocity's Wil6300 chipset was designed to move data to and from mobile devices much faster than is possible with currently used Wi-Fi solutions, to keep up with new demands from such mobile applications as 4K video streaming, media kiosk downloads, and personal cloud services, the company said.

The mobile chip will sample out to partners in the third quarter of this year, according to the chip maker. Wilocity was founded in 2007 and has already shipped 802.11ad Wi-Fi solutions built for PCs.

The Wil6300 "will give phone users 4.6 Gbps interference-free bandwidth, over 10 times faster than current best-of-breed mobile Wi-Fi, and greatly improve network capacity," Wilocity said, contending that the move to 802.11ad in Wi-Fi would "fundamentally change the way people use their mobile devices today, by providing near instantaneous access to the cloud, media upload and download, and allow for paradigm-changing cellular network offload."

The addition of such a giant data pipe to a mobile device doesn't come without a price, however. Wilocity said it's keeping a lid on the power draw and real estate taken up by its new Wi-Fi chipset by moving production to the 28-nanometer process.

"Power use is expected in the 200-300 mW range for streaming video and other typical user scenarios, with idle power consumption < 1mW when 802.11ad is not in use," Wilocity said.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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